iolent practical crises of human living. This kind of paradox may
be clearly perceived by anybody who happens to be hanging in mid-space,
clinging to one arm of the Cross of St. Paul's.

Father Michael in spite of his years, and in spite of his asceticism
(or because of it, for all I know), was a very healthy and happy old
gentleman. And as he swung on a bar above the sickening emptiness of
air, he realized, with that sort of dead detachment which belongs to the
brains of those in peril, the deathless and hopeless contradiction which
is involved in the mere idea of courage. He was a happy and healthy old
gentleman and therefore he was quite careless about it. And he felt as
every man feels in the taut moment of such terror that his chief danger
was terror itself; his only possible strength would be a coolness
amounting to carelessness, a carelessness amounting almost to a suicidal
swagger. His one wild chance of coming out safely would be in not too
desperately desiring to be safe. There might be footholds down that
awful facade, if only he could not care whether they were footholds or
no. If he were foolhardy he might escape; if he were wise he would
stop where he was till he dropped from the cross like a stone. And this
antinomy kept on repeating itself in his mind, a contradiction as large
and staring as the immense contradiction of the Cross; he remembered
having often heard the words, "Whosoever shall lose his life the same
shall save it." He remembered with a sort of strange pity that this had
always been made to mean that whoever lost his physical life should save
his spiritual life. Now he knew the truth that is known to all fighters,
and hunters, and climbers of cliffs. He knew that even his animal life
could only be saved by a considerable readiness to lose it.

Some will think it improbable that a human soul swinging desperately
in mid-air should think about philosophical inconsistencies. But such
extreme states are dangerous things to dogmatize about. Frequently they
produce a certain useless and joyless activity of the mere intellect,
thought not only divorced from hope but even from desire. And if it is
impossible to dogmatize about such states, it is still more impossible
to describe them. To this spasm of sanity and clarity in Michael's mind
succeeded a spasm of the elemental terror; the terror of the animal
in us which regards the whole universe as its enemy; which, when it is
victorious, has no pity, a